Donald Trump went beyond his usual racism and seemed to embrace eugenics Monday morning.
Speaking on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Trump ranted against Kamala Harris, claiming that “she wants to go into a Communist Party–type system.” He then attacked her for supposedly allowing serial murderers into America through open borders, “now happily living in the United States.” But Trump didn’t stop there.
“You know now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes, and we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” Trump told Hewitt.
JUST NOW: @realDonaldTrump leans heavily into race science by telling @hughhewitt that you can tell whether migrants are predisposed to committing murder by "their genes."
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 7, 2024
"We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now," he adds. pic.twitter.com/t722iYq4Hm
Attaching genetics to crime is another way for Trump to make racist claims about immigrants to the United States, implying that some ethnicities are predisposed to killing. It fits into what he’s said about different populations in the past, such as in 2018, when he referred to immigrants from Haiti and African nations as “people from shithole countries.”
Trump began his political career by complaining that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And earlier this year, Trump complained to wealthy donors at a fundraiser in Florida that immigrants weren’t coming from “nice” countries “like Denmark,” in effect saying that he’d prefer only white immigrants in the United States.
The former president has spread racist lies against immigrants during his current campaign, in particular against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. He has said that he wants to institute “bloody” mass deportations of immigrants if he returns to the White House. But blaming their “genes” is new, and is a reminder that he doesn’t seem to think being compared to Adolf Hitler, the most infamous eugenicist, is a bad thing. Was his latest remark inspired by the long list of things he likes about Hitler?
